


The Thing Is

by words-writ-in-starlight (Gunmetal_Crown)



Series: a woman who calls herself Karen [2]
Category: Daredevil (TV), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Assassin!Karen, Black Widow!Karen, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-23
Updated: 2015-07-23
Packaged: 2018-04-10 21:25:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,844
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4408217
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gunmetal_Crown/pseuds/words-writ-in-starlight
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which the woman who calls herself Karen has some things explained to her, and explains some things herself.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Thing Is

**Author's Note:**

> And so continues my foray into fanfiction, and Karen's foray into being a person rather than a weapon. Also, give yourself an imaginary cookie if you catch the direct reference to the Black Widow comics.

“So,” the woman who calls herself Karen says, brushing her hair back from her face with one long-fingered hand.  She is sitting in the conference room of Nelson and Murdock, facing her mildly-battered vigilante boss and her half-dismayed non-vigilante boss, and she feels like this might be the first time in her life that she has faced a trial she can’t stand to lose.  Matt’s explanation hadn’t shocked her as much as it must have shocked Foggy—she knows all about chemical enhancements, thank you, and she’s just impressed that he hasn’t died yet.  “The thing is…”

She trails off, unsure of where to begin.

The thing is.

The thing is that she can’t understand how it happened, but she is a secretary at a tiny law firm that can hardly keep the lights on most days, let alone the internet, and she has killed an important man (or perhaps the primary lackey of an even more important man), and she lives in a neighborhood with such a high crime rate that one murder, an attempted rape, and two muggings is a _good_ night.  The thing is that her two bosses are best friends, like something out of a myth, and one of them is round-faced and gregarious and determined and afraid of the whole world and ready to face it anyway, and the other is fine-boned and soft-spoken and hard and merciless and so full of divine wrath that she sees visions of archangels smiting down demons that look like little girls.  The thing is that her life is at risk again, all the time, because of their cases and the people they’ve taken down and the people they’ve turned away.

The thing _is_ that she’s never been this deliriously happy in her life.

And for the first time ever she has something to lose, something that she cherishes even more than the praise of her teachers or the victory of triumph, something that she’s not sure she can live without anymore, and she’s never been this freezingly terrified, either.

So she takes a deep, deep breath, letting the air wash into her throat and fill her lungs and press on her ribs and reach into her fingertips, and she uses all her training to wrestle her heartbeat down so that it stops shaking her with its desperation, and she speaks.

“My name is Karen Page,” she repeats, and this time when Matt cocks his head attentively she knows he’s listening to the steady, honest beat of her heart.  She wonders when it became flesh again, if maybe when she cut out the tracking implant she cut out the clockwork they had filled her with and set down to growing her own organs back again.  She speaks without thinking and the words fall from her lips like honey and poison.  “I was one of twenty-eight young ballerinas with the Bolshoi—no,” she interrupts herself, biting back their words and swallowing them down.  She will speak the truth or die trying.  “No,” she repeats.  “I was one of twenty-eight Black Widow agents with the Red Room.”

Her voice leaves an aching, gaping silence behind them, one that threatens to consume the scraps of soul she has pieced and stitched together over the years as Foggy gapes at her and Matt’s lips part in surprise.  She will never be able to unsay the words, and she wonders if this is what most people feel when they stand at the top of a high place.  She has already stepped off the cliff, now all that is left is to find out if she can survive the sudden stop at the end.

The thing is that she never wanted her old life in the first place, and she fought with all the ruthlessness of a child against it, and when they saw her bare her teeth and rake at them with her nails, they said that she was strong.  The thing is that she was never the best of them, never as good as Natalya, as Yelena, but she was quieter and more stealthy in her skills and it made her lethal and she wanted to be better.  The thing is that she always wanted to be Natalya, she wanted to be as clever as Natalya as a child, she wanted to be as strong as Natalya as a young girl, she wanted to be as brave as Natalya as a teenager, she wanted to be as beautiful as Natalya as a young woman, she wanted to be as free as Natalya as an adult.

The thing _is_ that she doesn’t know if Natalya would tell them the whole truth, or if Vasilisa would tell them the whole truth, or even if the girl she was so long ago would tell them the whole truth.

But she is Karen Page and she chose that name for herself and she has given up everything to be Karen Page and she loves these men and she will tell them the whole truth anyway, and when they leave she will survive because that is what Karen Page does.

So she does.  She opens her mouth and untold years of horror spill out, in fits and starts at first, but then faster and stronger, staining her lips with blood and bile and the torn fragments of the souls she has stolen.  She tells them about the sketchily remembered years of her training.  She tells them about her bones breaking under the hands of the others.  She tells them about being taught to seduce men in their fifties before she was in her teens.  She tells them about being taught to shoot a gun, to throw a knife, to use poison, to use her fists.  She tells them about blood on her hands and praise in her ears.  She tells them about narrowing down the candidates and ripping out the throat of a sixteen-year-old girl with her hands and teeth.  She tells them about being put in a machine and tortured as a reward for surviving, about being given gifts by her superiors, about quick reflexes and disproportionate strength and rapid healing.

She tells them about the years she remembers more clearly, about being sent out to kill and learn and seduce and corrupt.  She tells them about hearing that Natalya, perfect Natalya, gifted Natalya, Natalya with all her thousand shards of glass, _the_ Black Widow in a bloody room full of weak imitations, had been taken by SHIELD.  Not stolen, but escaped.  She tells them about realizing the difference between the two, realizing that if Natalya had escaped then the rest of them could too.  She tells them about the scrape of metal on bone as she slammed a knife home between the second and third vertebrae of her handler’s neck.  She tells them about becoming Karen Page, with a new accent and a new fondness for pretty things like heels and skirts and hands unbloodied by innocents, and about waking up next to a messily murdered body, and about being kidnapped and threatened by a man in a fine blue suit.

And then she is silent.  She has presented her case to the jury, and now all she can do is wait for the verdict, and it’s not the position that the boys are usually in, but if she’s learned anything it’s that sometimes things don’t work out like one might have expected.

Matt, dressed in his usual expensive button-down and slacks now instead of the armored suit, sits with his fingers woven together as if deep in prayer.  Foggy’s hair is wild from where he has run his hands through it, and now his palms rest over his face as if determined to hide from what the woman who calls herself Karen is saying to them.

And then she does something she doesn’t believe she’s ever done before, not _her_ , the nameless creature that lives behind a thousand masks.  Karen has done it, any number of times, but she doesn’t think she has.  Maybe Karen is more truth than lie after all.

She breaks the dark, grim silence of the room with a quiet, sweet, gentle joke.  “I could quit,” she says just above a murmur, “but I don’t think you could work the copier without me.”

“We can barely work the copier _with_ you,” Foggy says automatically, but his hands drop from his face and Matt’s spine loses its tension.  “Just…out of sheer morbid curiosity, is anyone else in this room going to drop a horrifying identity-related revelation on me tonight?”

“No,” Matt says in his softest voice, unseeing eyes looking in Karen’s direction.  The Devil of Hell’s Kitchen, the misnamed righteous warrior, seems to be inspecting her with every sense he possesses, and she waits patiently for him to find her wanting.  She waits for him to find the flaws in her skin and rip it off and cast her out like a pretty female Lucifer being evicted from a half-lit, dubiously painted Heaven.  Instead, he sighs and rakes a hand back through his dark hair and gives her a small smile, something a little more brittle and reserved than usual, but a smile.

“No,” Karen says quietly, and something settles in her chest.  “That’s everything.”

The thing is.

The thing is that she just spilled her entire life to these two men, she just broke her most sacred law and trusted another human being twice over, trusted flawed and damaged men with her secrets.  The thing is that if they wanted to, if they mistrusted her enough, they could bring the wrath of Hell (her Hell, anyway, her Hell full of blood and lies and twenty-eight beds with handcuffs on the headboards) down on her with all the effort of blinking an eye.  The thing is that she doesn’t know if she’s going to be able to stay with them, if they’ll be so angry in the morning once they’ve thought it through that they’ll drive her out.  The thing is that even if she does stay, she somehow imagines that it’ll never be exactly the same, there won’t be lies in the morning about bruises and cuts, there won’t be anxiety about Karen walking home alone, there won’t be easy trust with weapons and secrets.  The thing is that even if it is different, she will still be a secretary for a law firm that can barely keep the lights on and pays her less than dirt and puts her life and the lives of her bosses at risk.

But the thing _is_ that they smile at her and she smiles at them and they drink her terrible coffee and she yells at her terrible copier and sometimes they reveal hidden identities and horrible secrets and painful pasts and afterward all go out and drink the eel, which remains about the only alcohol she’s ever encountered that can get her drunk and she hopes that her gifts prevent her from having hangover the next morning.

When they don’t, she figures it could be worse.


End file.
